Cash, Stubborness and Music

I had the first cassette recorder when I was around 4. It was called Jola 2, a Polish make. I know, I know, Poland and cassette recorders. But hey, it was the peak of the communist era in the Eastern Europe, in very early seventies. We were all actually eating our own dog food.

I still have a very clear recollection of both the actual device and the context which lead to its acquisition. It was a black box with the cassette tray on the left side, with the speaker on the right side (it was an ellipse shaped speaker, I remember how I peaked through the small holes of the black plastic mask and realize the form which has letting the sound out). It also had a transparent radio scale with all the frequencies painted on it. A round knob on the right was moving (by the means of some complicated plastic wheels and thin strings) a small red line on top of that scale, so you know which frequency you were listening to. It was mono, of course, in 1974 having a stereo device would have been extremely difficult. The cassette was manipulated with a line of silver buttons, on top of the tray. One of them would open the tray, while the others were helping you play, record and rewind the tape.

We bought it, (actually, my dad bought it) one summer when we were on vacation at the Black Sea. At that time, Black Sea was a popular destination among other countries in the communist block. Many people from Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia were coming along. The political police wasn’t so obvious and many small things were still tolerated. Like a nudist beach in each resort, which, usually, was also the place where a little bit of black market could be seen. I don’t know why the black market was always around the nudist beaches, but this is how it was.

The Negotiation

One day we went on a walk, me and my father, to see what was going on at one of these “bissie-nissie“ (a covert term for ”business“ of course) places. I remember that I got chewing gum and I was making bubbles. My father was looking very carefully at all the stuff lined up on black teeshirts on one side of the beach. At some point, he saw a small black box and he asked for the price. He didn’t know any English, and, apparently, the seller didn’t know any English too. But they were waving around hands and fingers and they were also drawing numbers in the sand, erasing them quickly with their feet, once they were sure the other part got it right. My father asked for a short demonstration and the seller put a small thing into the black box, pushed some buttons and, miracle, the black box started to sing. I was amazed.

We went back to our place on the beach and my dad started to talk with my mom. He took a small purse (which was holding the money, I was going to find out soon) and we went back to the bissie-nissie place. This time we went straight to the seller place, which was a small room in one of the hotels lined up on the beach. They started to talk. Again, they didn’t speak any English and the seller native language was very strange (it was Polish). But they were talking like 15 minutes and apparently they were thoroughly enjoying it. They were both smiling and laughing. Twenty years later I learned that what was going on in that room was called negotiation. At some point, my dad took out the money from the purse and put it down. The color of the bills, wrapped up in a moderately big package, was blue. I remember that very clear. The seller wasn’t smiling anymore and he didn’t look quite happy. But as my father was still talking, smiling and waving his hands, the grumpiness on the face of the seller started to fade. The money package was still on the floor. After a few minutes, the seller made a funny face, something that was clearly saying ”well, what the heck“, took the money and gave the black box to my father. We walked out of the room with my very first music device. The silver top of it had a strange word, with red letters: Jola 2.

For the next few years, that music device took a very prominent place in my day to day life. Names like ABBA, Boney M and others became common in my vocabulary. I soon learned how to play a cassette, how to record music from the radio, or even from the device’s microphone, starting my own proto-podcast. I was about 5 years old. The audio cassettes were still fragile at that time and the technology of that Jola 2 wasn’t very advanced, so, every once in a while, the tape was stuck inside. I learned how to take out the tape and use a crayon to rewind the tape again inside the cassette. Of course, once the tape was wrinkled, the sound wasn’t that good anymore.

The Problem

As years went by, the Jola 2 approached its end. At some point, it just stopped working. I had no idea why. But my father took a screwdriver, took out the back side and started to look inside, with just a soldering gun and a lot of patience.

I remember my first encounter with the inside of the cassette recorder. It was so colorful inside, so full of wires and strange shapes that I just couldn’t take my eyes out of it. I stayed near my father and watched how he slowly started to dismantle it, piece by piece, wire by wire. It was obvious he didn’t have any idea about how it’s working. Other than: ”this might be the power wires, they must be the power wires. Now, where do they have to go?“. He really had no idea how the whole device was working, but he had an incredible stubborness and patience. After the first few evenings (he was still working all day and he had time for the ”cassette repairing“ only late in the evening) I just gave up and went away, finding other ways to fill my time. But my father stood there and he even started to look at the electrical scheme (a huge piece of paper filled with strange symbols).

After a few weeks, in one of those long evenings in which my father was completely immersed inside the cassette recorder (sometimes  felt like he was literally inside that box, eaten up by those colored wires and shapes, melting inside the delicate electrical engines) well, one of these nights, I heard music again. I was so surprised that I was looking outside the room. Nope, it wasn’t coming from the inside. My father actually repaired the cassette recorder. It was working again.

I was so shocked that I couldn’t ask my dad how he did it. He just did, and that was all that counted for me. Before he put on the black panel I took a final look at the inside of Jola 2. It was as colorful as I remembered it, but now there were some new things popping up. In some places there were some new wires added, while in others there was something resembling to metal stitches. It was changed, that’s for sure. But it worked again.

After Jola 2 I also had a Kashtan, a Russian magnetophone on which I listened to rock music for the first time, but that’s another story.

The Business Approach

Around the age of 30, after I was rambling around, doing pretty much nothing with my life, I decided to become a business man. I started from scratch an online publishing company, which at its peak was the third player in the market. After 10 years, I sold it for a profit.

Starting it, making it work and then growing it wasn’t easy at all. But as I grew, both in terms of experience and lucidity, I started to realize something. It was related to my first cassette recorder, of course.

First: the negotiation in that room was something extremely important. If you go out and ask every business man which is the most powerful tool in a negotiation, they will always tell you: ”cash“. Cash is king. As a four year old kid I had absolutely no idea about it, of course. But I did recall the strange discussion between my dad and the Polish seller. As I was going to find out soon, in my own business, each negotiation is the same: both parties are just talking in their own language. There is seldom a real communication between them (that’s why my father and that guy were able to understand each other, although they didn’t speak each other language). But the moment my dad put the money package on the floor, everything changed. In a few minutes, the other guy made that funny face, like ”well, what the heck“, took the money and gave us the device. In other terms, we closed the deal.

I used this, unconsciously, in many deals as a business man. To this very moment, for me, cash is the most powerful tool in a negotiation.

Second, it was the ”breaking up“ moment. The moment the cassette recorder stopped to work. As a business man, I experienced a lot of crisis. Sometimes it was a cash crisis, sometimes it was a market crisis, sometimes it was all of that and even more. And each time I had a crisis, I also applied unconsciously the same approach as my father. Took up the back panel, dive into it without any knowledge of the problem, but with an iron like desire to make it work again. Studied the causes, did a lot of trial and error, sometimes drastically modifying the inside of the music box, but, after a certain period of time, the music was on again. I think you may call this discipline and stubborness. Without it, I highly doubt that any business can advance.

The Selective Recollection

We tend to select from our past the supporting memories. I’m sure there were a lot of details to be remembered from both the negotiation part and the breaking up of the device. I’m sure I could’ve remember the hotel room paintings or the color of the carpet (since I did remember the color of money package) or even the face of the Polish seller. I’m also sure that I could remember the shape of the table at which my father sat while he tried to fix the Jola 2.

But nope. I did remember what I needed to. Which is another way of saying that we have all the resources we need. We literally have access to an endless reservoir of inspiring and supporting examples in our own lives.

Each and every situation in our lives carries the seeds of something important. Just be aware and look carefully.

I guarantee that if you do it, the music will never stop.

The Slow And Almost Invisible Reward Of Doing Things Constantly

It’s almost noon and I’m in my car, driving Victor, my son, to his school. We spent some time at my place, watching movies and working on his latest project, rockpedia.co. Victor is almost 14. He’s into rock music (obviosuly) and all the stuff of a typical teenager.

“When did you learn to drive so well?” he asks, out of the blue. The question is brutally taking me by surprise. Not only because I never thought at myself as being a good driver, but also because of the context. We were slowly talking about some concerts that we are about to see in the next few weeks, and then, out of nowhere, this question.

“Well, I don’t know”, I answered, just to keep the conversation running. A more thoughtful answer would have required me to stop the car and start thinking over. “Might be experience?” tried Victor to help. “By all means, why not?” I answered, somehow relieved.

And then I really started to think. And since I was also focused on the road, I chose the lighter version of thinking: namely, some rough number crunching.

“I think I have more than 200.000 kilometers on board”, I said. “200.000 kilometers is a lot. I think I learned to drive so well during those 200.000 kilometers”, I continued. “How many accidents did you have?” asked Victor. “None serious”, I answered. “Only three. I was hit two times by two different idiots, and then the third well, it wasn’t technically an accident, since I was able to avoid it. We touched, but it could have been much worse”.

And then I realized that Victor was right. I was a good driver. As a matter of fact, I am a really, really good driver. And I’m not talking about speed, or racing or other childish stuff like that. I’m talking about the ability to get myself safely from one place to another, by car. And yes, the third incident, the one that I avoided, was really close.

As I started to recall the context of that accident, all the adrenaline started to rush again. It was a matter of seconds in which I had to take the decision to stop, or to step on it. The other car was slowly crossing the road, out of nowhere, 50 meters in front of me. I was driving a 2 tons SUV, coming forward at about 70 km/h. In a split of a second, I decided it would be much better to step on it rather than trying to hit the brakes. It’s kinda hard to stop a 2 tons car. Especially since you spotted a possible trace, a very narrow corridor, between that slow car and the other side of the road. “If that car would go forward at the same speed, and if I steer exactly 1 meter to right, I can come first”, I said to myself. And that’s exactly what I did. I stepped on it to the floor, then gently, extremely gently steered to the right and came right in front of the other car, just scratching my left rear light to his bumper. My car was a really solid SUV, so the impact, as light as it was, made his bumper fly 20 meters away. My car was barely scratched.

And then, after the adrenaline started to slow a bit and I was paying more and more attention to the road in front of me, in my present car, near Victor, I realized it wasn’t a matter of seconds. It was a matter of under a second. All these decisions, all these reactions, took place in less than a second.

“I think I had around 180.000 kilometers when I avoided that accident”, I said to Victor. “How much is 180.000 kilometers? Like Romania?” he asked. “Oh, no, not at all”, I answered.

And then I started to crunch some other numbers. “You know, I think it’s 4 times the equator. 4 times around the world  by car”. His eyes grew like two truck lights in the darkest night ever. “4 times around the world? Oh my!”

Day By Day

I didn’t make a goal from my driving. I just did it every day.

And it started really slow, if you’re curious. My father didn’t let me drive his car, so that made me a little bit reluctant to the whole thing. My friends were impressing girls with their father’s cars already, but I couldn’t do it. Some of my friends even managed to steal their parents cars when they weren’t at home, but I couldn’t do this either.

So, when I had my first driving lesson, I was around 22 or 23 years old. I did it mostly because “you gotta have your license driver, right?”. And, without too much bells and whistles, I took my driver license.

My first car was a Dacia. A wreck. The engine was constantly overheating and tons of white smoke emerged from under the hood. Most of the times, this happened when I was in the middle of some crowded intersection.

The next car was a Skoda Fabia. Easier to drive and nicer. I did my first inter city trip with that, more than 450 kilometers.

And the next one was an Opel Astra, the sport version. I crossed the country back and forth with it and it also was the first car in which I visited Europe.

Then, since I owned for three years the biggest car portal in Romania, I started to drive pretty much every car that was imported in my country. We used to do this on a regular basis in order to write reviews on the site. So, I started slow, but I went forward.

You Don’t Even Know You’re Doing It

As I wrote this, as I started to unfold a series of apparently dull and unimportant events on my life, emerged from a simple conversation with my son in my car, I realized something extremely powerful.

And that is the power of doing things constantly. It’s not like the habit of it. It’s much more than that. It’s part of your life. It’s so melted into your existence that it doesn’t really show up anymore. You can’t say it’s there, but you’re doing it. Just like I eventually drove hundreds of cars (and I mean it, hundreds of them) because it was part of my day to day job.

And, at some point, I was able to stop a terrible thing. I prevented a horrible accident, in under a second, because all my reflexes, all my experience and all my skills were so fit together, so easy to access and to use, that it almost look like nothing to me. It was natural. The decision to step on it instead of stopping it. The narrow corridor I isolated in a split of a second. The steering, so smooth and yet so perfect, that it left the driver of the other car speechless, unable to respond to any of my (I admit, quite angry) questions, while he was holding his bumper. He might as well have seen an alien, that day…

So, what is the area in your life when you’re doing things so often, so constant, so good that you don’t even realize you’re doing them? Do you have such an area in your life? Some area where you started really slow, but then stayed there and did it every day? Each and every day? If you do, I bet you think it’s just a dull and unimportant thing, right?

Well, think again. Because one day, after you’ve been to the end of the world and back for at least 4 times doing that thing, somebody will notice how wonderful you are when you’re doing it.

Taming Monkey Number One – First Update

I think it’s time to see how I did so far with my first monkey. For those of you who doesn’t know yet, I ditched my New Year resolutions and replaced them with a different approach: taming monkeys. Very shortly put, a monkey is an underdeveloped part of yourself, a goal frozen in its evolution, an internal form that mimics a human being but never gets the chance to really become one. If you want to know more about this whole weird thing, you can go ahead an read the introductory post and also the post in which I explain how to find your inner monkey.

Monkey Number One: A New App In The App Store

Ok, I already let you know that in the first month I just want to have a new app in the AppStore. It’s not just an app, it’s one that it’s been floating around in my universe for some time now, and, somehow, never made it to my focus. Without revealing too much about the scope of the app, and thus, spoiling your surprise, I will briefly give you an idea about what the app is supposed to do.

• It will have a local pre-filled database.
• It will save the data locally on the iPad (yes, it will be primarily an iPad app, will see later on if I’d make an iPhone version too).
• It will also give the user the chance to save the data remotely, making it public.
• It will also allow the user to use social media services, like Twitter or Facebook, for a variety of operations.

The reason I gave these details is because they’ll have an impact on the overall taming process. It’s a relatively complicated app and it requires at least an extra level of complexity given the fact that it will need to save data remotely, outside of the device.

Taming Status

Until now, I worked 7 days on the taming. The rest of the time I was doing regular stuff like writing on my blog, consulting, interacting on social media (if we’re talking about what I consider work) and I also managed to have a real life. Quite a full one. Two week-ends ago I went with my daughter at a friend house, in the mountains. One evening, I accepted an invitation to theater from somebody in my social network. I think I already told you that I do try to bring as much as I can in the real life from my digital life.

So I got pretty busy. But I did manage to do the following:

• bought the domain name
• configured a web site and a PHP framework for that domain name
• made the basic wireframe (pretty much a mind map)
• finished the local pre-filled database, all the required info is in the app
• created the database model on the iPad (I’ll use Core Data for storage)
• started to work on the basic database features on the device. Which means right now I can add and retrieve real data using the app interface. Not all the needed data is processed yet, but the most important parts of it are taken care of

It’s not much, but, at the same time, it’s a lot. I don’t know if this makes sense to you, but to me it’s something really different. It may look like it’s just a stub, but that stub it’s real. Until just two weeks ago, everything was just an idea. At most, it was a nice topic in a “iOS related” conversation. Something like “what would you say about and app that will do this and that?”. Pretty fancy during the conversation, but completely vaporware.

So I guess right now I have a little bit more than nothing. Which is good. Anything more than nothing is good.

Taming Challenges

The biggest challenge so far it’s finding time for this. For some reason, it seems that my day is shortening at a very fast pace. I do suspect there are few tiny midgets that took over my watches. Every time I don’t look, they’re feeding themselves with my minutes. Otherwise I really couldn’t explain where my time flies. I feel really, really short on time.

Perhaps that goal of “still having a life while doing this” it’s starting to manifest too. That would be an explanation. I do want to still have a life, to enjoy my time with my children and friends, to relax, to exercise, you know, what normal people are doing. Obviously this is taking important chunks of time from my regular work routine. Fact is I’m finding extra time for this taming task really, really hard. I guess that’s the reason I worked only 7 days out of 17 so far.

Another interesting challenge is to keep the idea flow steady and the app features “clean”. The moment I start writing some code, it’s like opening a high pressure water hose. New ideas are starting to emerge in minutes and I want to add this feature, and also this feature, and, of course, you gotta have this feature too. I know I can’t add them all. It’s not possible. Taming this monkey will require to have a MDP (minimum demo product) in the store. An MDP is something good enough to prove your model but without all the bells and whistles you want to put on it.

What seems to help me so far in keeping this under a certain control it’s my Assess – Decide – Do methodology. Every time I have an idea I stop, fire up my iAdd app on the iPad, add the idea, and then get back. I keep all new  blurbs into a separated collection.

Next Steps

The first and most important step would be to sustainably create more chunks of time each day. As I can’t really get rid of any of my daily activities (including blogging, consulting, and, of course, having a life) the only solution would be to wake up early each morning. I am already a huge fan of becoming an early riser but I admit I didn’t do it very often, especially during the holidays. I wake up every morning around 7 AM and I can get along quite ok with this.

But getting at least two more hours every day will require to wake up at 5 AM each day, including week-ends. I still have 14 days to finish this. That will give me around 28 hours of work. I think it can be done in 28 hours. But I have to get those 28 hours first. So, waking up at 5 Am each day.

Another important step would be to exercise more. Nothing heavy, maybe some running or pushups. From my previous experience it’s very important to balance the brain strain with physical exercise. I can do it without it, but it seems that the least annoying consequence of this would be a low emotional vibe. Every time I had intense brain workouts without balancing them with some physical workouts too, I had strong feelings of pressure. You know, like sadness, lack of motivation and alike. Not good. But exercising helps releasing endorphins. And endorphins are good.

Side Benefits

The main benefit would be to tame the monkey, of course. To finish the idea. To have the app in the AppStore. But there already some side benefits. To be honest, I didn’t see them coming.

First one is that I feel more enthusiastic (and I want to remain like this, hence my intention to balance this extra effort with some daily workouts). The feeling of watching something growing under my eyes, seeing the app unfolding day by day, that is something that releases tons of endorphins. I don’t know if everybody feels that, but I do. I have an incredible feeling of excitement every time I bring something from the idea level on the material level. Making things happening is one of the most fulfilling activities for me and surely this monkey is giving me a lot of reasons to to be happy.

Another side benefit is a little, but noticeable improvement in my discipline. I won’t lie to you, I’m a pretty damn disciplined fellow. Some guys are telling me that my schedule could rival with one that is imposed in military camps. So I’m not a newbie in this area. And still, I do feel that some parts of my daily routines are getting improved. Specifically, its about the parts in which “I don’t know” what to do. Call them pastimes or relaxation hours. Until I started to tame this monkey, I did have some times during the day when I allowed myself to just drift away and do whatever I feel like. It was ok. But a little bit shallow. Now I feel that I should get more of each relaxation hour instead of just going with the flow and doing whatever happens to be available. As I told you, I already had a trip to the mountains, I saw a theater play and all this just in the last 10 days. I feel eager to try new ways to relax. Which is very good. I think.

***

Well, that’s it, That was my first update on taming my monkeys. As always, if you feel like sharing your own taming monkeys experiences, don’t be shy. Leave a comment and share.

5 Tips For Incorporating Exercise Into Your Life

This is a guest post by Greg Blencoe, @gregblencoe

In his recent post “How To Invest In Yourself (And Why)”, Dragos discussed the importance of exercising regularly.  I couldn’t agree more.

I have been exercising in some form or another since I was five or six years old.  I played on countless sports teams growing up.  With the exception of a few breaks when I was only running, I have been weightlifting consistently since I was 15 years old.  And I ran the Chicago marathon back in 2002.

Exercise has made an extremely positive impact on my life.  I think a lot of my self-esteem and self-confidence is due to exercising.  Furthermore, when I exercise, I am much more relaxed and can think much more clearly throughout the day.  And I have met so many wonderful, uplifting people while doing activities involving exercising.

Here are five tips for incorporating exercise into your life:

1.  Find an activity involving exercising that you enjoy

The first step in making exercise a part of your life is to find an activity involving exercising that you enjoy.  This is extremely important.  If you don’t enjoy the activity, you are much more likely to stop doing it.  Fortunately, there are all kinds of different activities that involve exercise.

For example, you might enjoy yoga, tennis, swimming, aerobics, running, playing soccer, weightlifting, walking at your local mall, cycling, or hiking.  There are obviously many other possibilities.  The point is to find one or more that you enjoy, so you have fun while exercising.  This will make it a lot easier to exercise on a consistent basis.

2.  Exercise multiple times per week for 30-60 minutes each time

While there are some people (e.g. professional or Olympic athletes) that might exercise up to 4-5 hours or more every day with relatively few days off, you can achieve very significant benefits from exercising in much less time.  For the average person, I think exercising 2-4 times per week for 30-60 minutes each time is about right.  Of course, you should always consult with your doctor before starting any exercise routine.  And depending on your current level of fitness, you may need to start slowly and work your way up to this level.

3.  Exercise consistently

I believe that the key to exercise is consistency.

I have seen friends of mine get very motivated about exercising for brief periods of time due to certain things happening in their lives.  For example, a girlfriend breaking up with you or an upcoming high school reunion can definitely make a guy want to get fit!  I have seen these people go from not exercising at all to working out very hard for a few months (e.g. exercising 1-2 hours per day for 5 days per week) and achieve amazing results during that time.  However, every time, the person eventually burned out and found a reason to stop exercising.

I think a much better approach is to exercise consistently over a long period of time (preferably the rest of your life!).  In very general terms, I would define consistently as exercising 2-4 times per week for 30-60 minutes each time during at least 75% of the weeks during the year.  This would allow you to take up to about one week off per month.

4.  Find ways to enjoy exercising even more

In order to become even more motivated to exercise, I highly recommend looking for ways to make your activities involving exercise even more enjoyable.  Here are several ways you can do this.

One of the most common ways is to listen to music.  You will not only enjoy listening to your favorite songs, but you will likely be energized which should make you work out harder.  Furthermore, if walking is your primary activity involving exercise, you might also enjoy listening to audio books or podcasts during this time.

Another way to enjoy exercise even more is to mix up your routine.  For example, a person who swims a few times per week might choose to play basketball instead from time to time to break up the routine.  One way I do this is to work out at different gyms.  My gym membership gives me access to all of the different locations.  While I usually go to the location that is closest to me, I will often go to one of two other locations that are also relatively close.  This allows me to see some of my friends that usually work out at those gyms.

Moreover, while I run inside when it is cold or raining, I run outside a lot when it is sunny and warm.  There is a park right by the lake close to where I live that has a 4.5 mile (approximately 7.25 kilometers) loop where people can walk or run.  I run there a lot from April to October when the weather is nice.

5.  Live an overall healthy lifestyle

While exercising in itself is very important, it is really just one part of living an overall healthy lifestyle.  Here are several suggestions for healthy living which will improve the results that you get from exercising.

The first is to watch what you eat.  Let me say upfront that I believe that eating should be an enjoyable part of life.  I don’t think that watching what you eat should mean completely taking away this enjoyment by eating very little, not eating any food you enjoy, etc.  However, moderation is very important.  For example, perhaps one piece of chocolate will do instead of two or three.  And maybe eating a certain type of fruit would be just as enjoyable as an unhealthy snack.  These small choices involving eating that are made every day make a really big difference over time.

Another suggestion is to drink mostly water.  When I started doing this a few years ago, I lost 5-10 pounds in about a month.  And I was very fit at the time.  But it helped me to become even more toned.  For the first week or two, the lack of taste with the water was an issue.  However, I quickly got used to it.  Now I don’t have much desire to drink anything else.  And drinking water makes me feel extremely healthy.

Finally, I highly recommend doing your best to surround yourself with supportive, positive people.  These types of people will make your life so much better by giving you encouragement and celebrating your successes.

Final thought

If you are not currently exercising, I hope you will consider making it a part of your life.  I view exercise as one of the best ways to become Brilliantly Better.

Author Bio: Greg Blencoe is the author of the personal development blog Positive Waves Baby.

Rising above the Context

We’re greatly influenced by surroundings. From our friends to the way we lay out furniture in our rooms everything has an impact on the way we act, react and deal with our life situations. I call these surroundings, generically, contexts. One of the things which constantly fascinates me is how to get over your contexts. Like overcoming them, stretching and reaching beyond.

It Ain’t a Walk in the Park

Everybody talks about how wonderful is to overcome your condition. To win against all odds. To get over your current status and reach to something way better than everybody thinks it’s possible. Well, that might be true, but it talks only about the second half of the game. The half in which you already reached beyond. And I totally agree: once you got over your pressuring contexts, everything is pink and easy. Sweet harmony all over.

But few are talking about the first half of the game. The half in which you are struggling. In which you are in a war. The part of the game in which every part of your being is challenged. The part in which you are ready to quit more than one million times (and yet still remain in the game). The part in which you don’t really believe you can do it unless you leave all hesitations behind and just dive in, like jumping into an empty pool, hoping water will be there by the time you’ll need it.

This is where everything happens. This is where you conquer your freedom, beat the context and reach out. And that part is not about harmony. It’s not about fulfillment either. It’s about challenging the status quo, about creating disruption and denying your current condition. All in the hope of something better, agree, but something better which doesn’t exist yet. I’ve already told you, and I’m telling you again, I’m fascinated about how one can give up everything he has – like his current context – for a promise of something which doesn’t yet exist: his goals.

Reaching beyond your context is risky, difficult and totally against nature. You’re chasing fantasies. You’re fighting your current position, your current stream of life. You can’t reach out to the things you want until you actually destroy what you have right now. You can’t become the one you want unless you give up the person you are right now. In order to become a bird you have to break the egg shell. Can’t stay in the egg context forever. And this is destruction. This is fight. You’re eliminating something: most of the time, parts of yourself.

Financial Struggle

One of the most common contexts people want to overcome is their current financial situation. They’re willing to give up what they have in exchange for something better. Like their current income for a future, allegedly better one. But somehow, in the process, they don’t really get over the current context. They expect a better context, but they don’t really get out from their current one. The risk part of the game is unconsciously rejected. Reaching beyond will actually destroy what they currently have. And the result is more than often predictable: they can’t reach beyond their current context.

Your financial context shapes a lot around you. There’s a huge part of life far and beyond money, I agree, but if you are interested in exploring the world in all its dimensions, having a good financial potential is a key factor. Money gives you the possibility to travel, to live a better life, to enjoy more, to experiment more. If you’re rejecting a potentially better financial context, you’ll rejecting a better life.

The current global financial context is a mess. We’re going through a world financial crisis and that’s a fact. People are losing jobs, houses and businesses are dramatically decreasing profit margins. There’s constraint. There’s limitation. It’s a tough financial context. And yet, being just a context, it can be overcome. People often forget that. In a strange, yet totally understandable way, the current context becomes the expected one. Financial struggle became the new comfort zone. Living under your real possibilities is accepted as norm.

And yet, this is just a context, folks. Just a context. You can overcome this. You can reach beyond and change it for the good.

What Does it Takes?

Finally. The question I’ve been waiting since the beginning of this article.

It takes discipline. And vision. And trust. This is all it takes to overcome a limiting financial context.

You need discipline to stay on track even with limited supply. Learn to live frugally while aiming for more. Discipline to implement frugality but not to get used to it. I’m not into frugality and I enjoy life to the fullest, whenever I can. But if there are limiting contexts, I can adjust. And so can you, until the storm is gone.

You need discipline to understand the new processes around you. Overcoming your current context means learning new things, making new connections, really grasping the underpinnings of the new, richer context. These are all new and if you don’t focus on them, you risk being pulled back to the old context.

And you need vision. You need to be able to identify the new context, to establish a new financial level, even if only mentally for a few months or years. Or weeks, if you’re really into it. You need vision to be able to actually see where you want to be.

And you also need vision to integrate your life in the new structure. Everything will be different in that new context. You will be different, your relationships will be different, your physical surroundings will be different. If you are acting on a new, more abundant financial context, things will dramatically change around you. Better cope with it, or you’ll lose it.

And, last, but certainly not least, you need trust. Not a blind trust that things will go smoother, although this kind of trust can’t hurt. But hope alone will do nothing. You’ll need trust that you’ll have enough power to finish the race. Trust that you know what you’re doing. Trust that you’ll be able to go through this even if everything else around collapses. And trust that you deserve what you envisioned.

Discipline, vision and trust, those are your only allies in the first half of the game. You’ll go through many battles and hit a lot of walls. You’ll lose some, you’ll win some. In the end, you’ll reach above the context and you’ll tell everybody how pink and easy your life is right now. And you wouldn’t lie, of course. Your life is sweet harmony all over, now that you’re enjoying a brand new abundant financial context.

But you couldn’t make it without discipline, vision and trust.

The game has always two parts. Usually, the first one is the most difficult. You don’t want to talk about it. And to some extent that is ok. You’re free not to talk about it as long as you still keep it handy for the next challenge. As long as you don’t let your secret tools (discipline, vision and trust) worn out in a comfortable, yet infinitely fragile and temporary context.

How To Write Compelling Content For Your Blog

The age of blogging galore is over. Just because you have a blog doesn’t mean you’ll automatically have readers too. There was a time when the mere fact of having a blog would bring you an interested and sometimes avid audience. But now the field is too crowded and you really need to stand out if you want to talk to somebody else besides the guy who’s looking at you from the reflection of your monitor.

I’ve written more than 300 articles on this blog by now, and I feel I have only scratched the surface. In today’s article I’ll share some of my insights on how to write constant, quality and engaging content for your blog. Although I primarily blog about personal development, this post won’t be about this specific niche, you can use the advice for whatever blog you have, or intend to have.

Play With Your Words

This is by far the most important and useful tip for writing good content, at least for me. Although I have a constant pool of ideas, I like to write without constraint, to play with the sentences and see where I land. By playing with my words I understand writing in a free form, without being concerned about following the main idea of the post.

You may find yourself drifting really fast from the initial target and write about things that are surprising even for yourself. Or you realize that you’re not so keen about the initial idea and another, much appealing topic is rising. Go for it. Write as you don’t have a deadline or a structured approach. See where you land.

Apart from being a very good antidote to writer’s block, this free form writing approach is almost always a fantastic way of brainstorming new ideas. Every time I start writing an article, I don’t really know if it’s going to be a series, if it’s going to be about the initial topic, or if it will be 400 or 4000 words. But I do know for sure it will be something I would love to write about.

Keep An Incubator Of Ideas

If you’re serious about blogging, you’ll going to be serious about blogging. And by that I mean you’ll have to treat it as a full time occupation. The published articles on your blog will be only the visible part of an iceberg. Under the sea level lies your entire setup. One of the most important parts of this setup is what I call an incubator of ideas.

Your blog will be a reflection of yourself, regardless of the topic you write about. Ideas can come in the most unusual places and at the most unusual times. You have to develop a scaffold for capturing those ideas and keep them in a safe place. The capturing setup is beyond the scope of this article, as it implies a variety of approaches and devices, for now it’s important to know that you have to capture and keep all of your ideas.

I created such a blogging incubator setup using MacJournal and its ability to create smart journals based on a variety of keys (tags, post priority, post status, etc). Even more, I use a GTD paradigm, meaning I isolate the “Next Posts” in a separate journal, so I can always have a fresh focus on them. Feel free to read the entire tutorial.

Make Room For Other Opinions

One of the most forgotten things about blogging is its conversational nature. A blog is made of much more than your own insight. It’s made of your readers comments, the pingbacks, the blogogsphere reactions, and more. If you write in a very sharp way, keeping a rigid approach, chances are that your blog will not become mainstream soon. It may attract a small pool of faithful fans, if you are really good, but not more. In this case, I think you’re using blogging in a therapeutical way which is not inherently good or bad, it will just not become very popular.

Making room for other opinions will allow your readers to express their own insights, to create controversy, to allow freedom of speech and to receive new hints for future posts. I’m not talking only about keeping the comments form opened and answering to your readers as soon as you can, I’m talking about a whole specific approach in your writing.

Even when you’re giving advice or when you’re expressing a very personal point of view, allow yourself the freedom to be challenged on that. Most of the blogs I read on a regular basis have this approach: they present facts or ideas in an open way, giving me a chance to react, to enhance or to disagree openly. And you know what? I can’t wait to come back again to see what happened since my last visit.

Clearly State Your Expertise

No need to be shallow if you’re blogging. No need to brag either, of course. But there is a very important point you should be aware of: make your expertise very transparent. It will not only help your credibility, but it will give your readers a sense of comfort.

If you had a business for 10 years, be transparent on that. I had a business for 10 years, and that gave me the perspective and authority to write several series about how to create and maintain an online business.

But if you started something new, and have no idea about what you’re doing, be also transparent. One of the most read sections in my blog is about the raw food diet. I kept a raw food diet for more than 7 months (it ended once I got back from my trip to Japan) and blogging about it was a fantastic way to learn something new. I wasn’t an expert on that, and I clearly stated that.

Be Consistent

Keep a closed list of topics. That will make your blog easily recognizable. Don’t go too far, don’t spread too much. If you have other interests, the best thing you can do is to create separated blogs for them. Consistency is the key in creating a credible blog brand. Two months ago I decided to migrate 2 of the categories of this blog, namely iPhone and astrology, into their own blogs: iPhoneCounty and AstrologyBits. I will write about iPhone and astrology here, of course, but only when there is a consistent overlap with the main topic of this blog, which is personal development.

Being consistent means also be your most attentive and agile reader. You have to constantly read your blog. Maybe this sounds strange, and it will be strange in the beginning, but once you crossed 50 or 100 articles, you’ll know what I mean.

When I had more than 200 articles, I decided it’s time to automate a little bit this task, and I created a mind map for my blog. I put each post into this mind map, and whenever I want to see my blog from a distance, to have an image of the content topics and their overall weight in the blog, I look at the mind map. There is a separate post about how to put your blog into a mind map (featuring a lot more than just keeping your posts in it), so feel free to read it.

Practice

Nobody will write content for your blog, you’ll have to do it. Of course, you can create a network of blogs, hire people to write and pay them. But in that case you’ll be an entrepreneur, not a blogger. A blogger blogs, period. So, practice your writing, do it often and do it again.

One of the key metrics of a blog is what I call posting speed. It’s basically how many articles you intend to write in a period of time (week or month). This posting speed has a very interesting effect on your writing: it will make it better. The more you write, the better will be at it. There is always a threshold here, you’ll have to experiment a little to see which posting speed is suitable for you. Last year I intended to write 90 articles in 90 days, and I failed miserably after only 17 articles.

But when I decided to have at least 15 articles by month (a practice I follow for about 8 months now) I also created a simple wordpress plugin in order to help me with it. It’s called wordpress blog audit plugin and you can download it from here (among other useful stuff to download). The plugin does a few simple things, one of them being the ability to show if you met or not your posting speed.

***

So, what are YOUR opinions about writing compelling content for your blog? What can you share about this topic? Do you find the advice useful? Do you have something to add? Would love to hear your insights in the comments.

Blogging As A Personal Development Tool

Everybody is blogging these days. Some are doing it for the money. Some are doing it for celebrity, while others are doing it for being noticed and getting a better job. Some of them are good technical bloggers, while others are blogging about sex or about travel.

I blog for more than 5 years now and one of the reasons I started it was for lobby. At that time I was an active player in the Romanian web publishing market and I decided it’s time to create an independent traffic measurement tool. It took more than 2 years but I finally got this thing started and it’s now live and working for the entire industry.

Blogging is certainly one of the most powerful and effective ways to create. It can bring you money, fame, it can spread your ideas and create communities, or it can bring close to you fascinating people. But the bigger, healthier and more interesting benefit of blogging among all is for personal development. I already wrote how I use travel for personal development, why I recommend entrepreneurship as personal development tool and even a post about astrology and personal development. If you’re not so much into astrology I recommend you to read first this article about understanding astrology.

In today’s post I’ll outline 5 reasons for which blogging is a fantastic tool for personal development.

1. Empty Your RAM By Blogging

One of the fundamentals principles of GTD (Getting Things Done) is to get rid of open loops. Open loops are thoughts which are constantly taking the scene of your mind until you find a way to organize them. Emptying the mind is a GTD technique in which you are writing down everything that’s on your mind, in order to decompress and let your brain do what it does best: creativity.

Blogging is a fantastic tool for that. Just writing out your problems could be enough to find the solution. Blogging is also great for setting a pace, for creating a rythm for your mind. Not to mention the support in making those mind emptying sessions into a constant habit. Although there is quite a difference between blogging and journaling there are common components, emptying the mind being one of them.

Since I started this personal development blog a lot of my mind clutter was gone. Just being able to keep a posting routine and a blogging setup in which I write and organize my activity is enough to make me lighter and clearer. A happy mind is most of the time an empty mind.

2. Keep Track Of Your Progress

All you write in your blog will be there in 3 years too (assuming you’re not going to intentionally wipe it down). Do you remember what you did 3 years ago? Like in each day? Or at least in each week? Well, you will in 3 years from now because you are keeping track of your life with your blog.

Assessing progress is often difficult in personal development, because it’s always inside the process. If you’re exercising, you have to watch the exercise process, if you’re learning a new language, you’ll have to watch the logs for that, and so on. Blogging makes it easy for you to witness everything you try, do, or intend to do, regardless of the specific process. It’s an universal assessment tool.

Reading some of the posts I wrote 3 years ago on this blog is an interesting experience. If I would start again, I wouldn’t write some of those posts, that’s for sure. Looking back at that phase is revealing me things that I didn’t even know I was doing at that time. I was hasty, unfocused and careless. I wonder how this post will look to me in 3 years from now.

3. Stand Up For Your Decisions

Blogging is a public activity. And by that, it enhances one of the key ingredients in personal development: accountability. All you write is public, it can be seen, commented on and quoted. Your ideas, goals and activities will be in open view. And if you say you’re going to improve yourself in some way, well, you must at least start doing it, since so many people already know about it, right?

Accountability is a close relative of responsibility. And with responsibility starts every meaningful change in your life. The moment you take responsibility for all your acts, you create a handle for your reality, you can influence it. If you put the responsibility for your acts on somebody else, you’re going to give him your reality handle too. And that would be really bad.

Blogging was certainly one of the most important accountability enhancers for me. I remember that one year ago I started a blog challenge: 90 posts in 90 days. I failed miserably at it, with only 17 posts, after which I got horribly ill. But I fully accepted it. Several months after I started a new challenge: one post every 2 days. Guess what, I’m doing great with it!

4. Discipline

Keeping a blog posting routine is great for discipline. It’s not that difficult to write a blog post every 2 days, after all. But keeping this habit for several months has tremendous implications. You become confident. Your self-esteem increases. You start tackling more and more difficult tasks because you now have the ability to do it.

Discipline is one of the most valuable yet difficult to obtain assets for personal development. It’s hard to create an effective scaffold for it, mostly because you perceive the things you have to do as a burden. Discipline is used to overcome obstacles, to win battles and to conquer heights. And by its very nature discipline is fundamentally opposed to pleasure.

But blogging can create a shortcut here. If you’re not overly pessimistic, writing about things you like – which is what blogging is supposed to be – can be a lot of fun. Writing daily about things you like also have this side effect of enhancing your over all discipline capacity. Keeping a blog for several months is in itself a little victory over your own procrastination tendencies. After this simple, yet pleasurable conquest, who knows, you may even start exercising daily. Or start a business. Or travel the world. And all was started with just a blog posting routine.

5. It’s All About Relationships

Having a blog is a two way communication. Everything you write is subject to a potential comment (if you’re not closing comments, which can make your blogging a little bit boring). And the people behind those comments are forming your relationship network. Blogging is a great way to meet people. Real life, like minded, interesting people.

Since I started to blog constantly here, more than 7 months ago, I met a tremendous amount of people. Some of them proved to be real assets, persons who are making a big difference in the personal development blogging niche. Some of them proved to be just nice people to talk and have around.

Whatever the role of those new people in your life, the simple fact that they are interacting with you is a great reward. Answering comments, taking challenges or even accepting writing suggestions from your readers are just some of the ways in which blogging can enhance your relationships skills. The most I get to know people, the better I get to know myself.

***

So, these are the 5 main points which are making blogging one of the most powerful and yet easy to use tools for personal development. Do you have other reasons in mind? Other blogging experiences? Suggestions? Would love to hear about them in the comments.

The First 6 Months Of Blogging – The Series

Everybody have a blog these days. And everybody wants to make money with that blog, if possible, the very next day after the first post. Well, I’ll say it straight from the beginning: it’s not that easy. It’s doable, of course, but it’s not the easy peasy piece of cake you see advertised all over the net. You need persistence, trust, self esteem and a positive attitude. You need to make a profession out of it, like any other profession out there. You can blog from home, of course, you can set your own hours and chose your own topics to write about, but fact is you have to take it seriously. Otherwise the compensation won’t be serious at all.

I started to blog in a “serious” manner 6 months ago. I consciously chose to switch from being a full time business man owning my own online publishing company to a full time personal development blogging career. I knew from experience that this won’t happen over night. Every important achievement comes after a decent amount of work and needs a certain timeframe to start, get a momentum and bloom. Having my own business for 10 years was surely a big advantage and we’ll see later in this series of posts why.

Oh, yes, this introduction is the beginning of a series of posts about my first 6 months of serious blogging. I reached my first main milestone and I want to share my findings. Overall, I’m more than satisfied with the progress of my blog so far. For me, it’s a personal success, regardless of the traffic / money numbers, although those numbers are pretty big for a 6 months old blog. There are other sources of satisfaction and I’ll try to cover them as I go along.

The series will cover several topics, including writing, promotion and, of course, making money. I bet the making money post will be the biggest surprise. Well, here’s how is going to be:

1. Writing
2. Promotion
3. Money
4. Tools (including a wordpress plugin I wrote)

The first article, Writing, will focus on the aspects related to the actual activity: your writing routine. Having a blog means writing blog posts. It’s fundamental, you can’t really avoid it. I will describe my experiments with several posting speeds, how a posting speed can be maintained with self-discipline, and how the writing can become a very organized and fulfilling activity, instead of becoming the biggest burden and source of worry for the average blogger.

The second article will be about Promotion. Promoting a blog is something that most people seem to ignore big time. They expect to write a good article and then to be flooded with visitors. In good Law Of Attraction terms this will happen at some point, if you keep writing good content, that’s a fact. But it can happen quite late if you don’t speed up the process a little. The problem is that there are tons of good articles out there and you must find a way to let people know that you exist in the first place.

The third article will cover the blogging Money. I will tell you from the beginning that money wasn’t my main focus when I started to write this blog. It is something that I want to happen at some point, but I want it to happen in a certain way. In the money post I will talk about my revenue streams, about my strategy and about my short and medium term intentions in creating and maintaining more revenue streams from this blog.

The final article will be the most technical one, about the Tools. I left the technical stuff in the end on purpose. Not all bloggers have a strong technical background and things like writing and promoting can be done without strong technical know-how. With the latest progress in the software development and server maintenance, they don’t actually need to be geeks anymore. But they need to have the ability to use some basic tools for various tasks. It will showcase some of my traffic numbers, traffic tracking tools, browser extensions and some of my own designed tools (a brand new wordpress plugin).

That’s it, stay tuned for the first article.

How To Create A Habit In 15 Days

Most of our life is lived by habits. We learn how to ride a bike, how to drive a car, we even learn how to speak and read. And then we do all of these with minimum effort and implication. Basically, all of these are habits. They allow us to focus on other things while pushing the routine into background. It would be quite difficult to learn to drive the car every time you need to go shopping, isn’t it?

As any other things in our life, habits are just tools we use in our joyful exploration of life. Habits are not good or bad, they are just ways of handling repetitive tasks that would otherwise require a lot of energy. As such, the master habit of creating / breaking your habits can be quite an asset.

In today’s post I’ll share some of my experiences with habit creation using one of my favorite activities: journaling. It’s a simple way in which you can assess, decide and then implement any new habit. There’s also a free downloadable journal template for you but let’s take the things one at a time.

Why Do You Need A New Habit?

Well, let’s say you want a new habit in order to:

• write on your blog more often
• update your twitter status daily
• write each day a page from your new book
• start a fitness program
• start a new eating habit or diet
• learn a new language

All these new activities are made by some repetitive tasks, a set of moves you have to do daily in order to get some positive results. So until you are proficient in that new language, or until you are that new blogging super star or until you publish your new book, you need a scaffold for your intentions. You need to create a habit of being there. (more…)

Overcoming Cravings On A Raw Food Diet

Soon I’ll have the 4th month anniversary of my raw food diet. This has been an exciting time for my body and mind and I think it’s only the beginning. The positive effects I outlined in my other posts describing the health benefits are going steadily, while the side effects, like detox simptoms are slightly fading away. My weight is constantly at the same level and my focus periods are getting better and better. I’m able to work more and feel more relaxed at the same time. To be honest, I barely know what a headache is and I haven’t been ill since this raw food diet started. My emotional flow is constant and even if I’m experiencing emotional detox from time tot time, it’s going better every time. After each emotional detox period I feel stronger and balanced.

There was however, a quite resistent aspect of this diet that concerned me a little and that was about cravings. I wrote before about that and I will write even more today, as I think I found a way to overcome those cravings. Keeping a raw food diet for a month or two is a manageable thing. But after you start to overlap some yearly eating habits, after you enter into a different season, for instance, your body will try to recall what it knows it’s eatable at that time of the year. Since I was taught for almost all my life that in winter we eat a lot of meat, for instance, my body is starting to ask for more meat. The actual needs of my body are easily met with fat rich raw foods like seeds or nuts, and I eat plenty of fat rich raw foods these days. The need is at a psychological level. There is an emotional link between a certain type of foods and my psychological reaction.

It took me some time to understand that. And a little bit more to decide how to break this. And this is how I started to do it.

The Power Of Example

I feel fantastic on this raw food diet, I really do. It’s one of my best periods in terms of health and lucidity. I don’t think I felt like this from my teenage period, when I was doing a lot of exercise and write every day. I feel gorgeous.

But sometimes I tend to forget this. I mean I feel so good that I can’t really imagine how it’s like to feel bad. I’m not tired at all and when I go to bed I usually fall asleep in less than 3 minutes. I sometimes monitor people around me and notice some visible spikes in their energy levels, followed by long periods of apathy. The spikes are mostly related to stimulents like coffee or cigarettes, they last for several minutes, while the apathy periods can last for several hours. Those periods are so clear to me, I can really grasp how the other person is feeling. This empathy boost must be related to the diet too. So, when I see how other people are doing around me, I remember that I used to do the same. I lived the same life and I was convinced that there is no other way of living. (more…)

GTD one liners: it’s not how you feel about what you’re doing, but about what you’re not doing…

The GTD one-liners are just short sentences that synthesizes in a very simple way some of the GTD concepts I found interesting or somehow become especially close to my activity. There are already 3 other GTD one-liners available and I also started a new section, available directly from the menu bar. The whole one-liner concept comes from the early stages of bash programming in Linux, when programmers started to write incredibly complex or useful programs in only one line of code. There are times even right now when I look for some specific one-liner in bash that could save me dozens of minutes of maintenance performance on my servers.

For now, let’s stick with our GTD one-liners. Today: it’s not how you feel about what you’re doing, but about what you’re not doing…

One of the most interesting things I’ve incorporated in my behavior from the GTD system is the way I feel about things I’m not doing. You can only do one thing at a time, you know? Even your brains works in sequentially patterns, one thought after another. At a very high speed, I agree, which can make you think sometimes there is some form of parallelism, but I assure you, the thinking is always done in a sequentially way: one synapse after the other. But because you’re not keeping everything in one place, as GTD requires, and your Inbox is not zero, you tend to split your focus among different thoughts. Trying to organize as you go. Or even worse, trying to do many things at once. That’s right, most of the time you try to focus about what you’re doing, but you can’t really make it because you’re thinking at something else. Something that you’re obviously not doing at that specific moment.

The consequence for this is something trivially simple: you really can’t do your job anymore, or at least in the initially agreed parameters. Or, in a more corporate-like form: your productivity is dramatically declining.  All of this because your focus is somewhere else.

(more…)